Oh Well Never Mind Bye attempts to lay bare the problems with the news media. It is billed as a play about the coverage of the Stockwell shooting in July 2005, when an innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot dead on a tube train at Stockwell station.

How and why the Brazilian electrician came to be mistaken for a suicide bomber and killed has been a story I have covered for almost four years. The shooting, on 22 July 2005, happened a day after the second terrorist attack on London's transport system within a fortnight. You would have to have been a fool or a liar not to have been a bit scared, and this production captures some of that fear and its effect on public mood at the time.

Set in the newsroom of a free newspaper, the play's narrative spine features a battle for the soul of the new reporter Georgina, writing what she is told in order to succeed, and the bitter idealist Charlotte, who openly battles her bosses and copes with the humiliations they inflict on her in return. In one crackling line she confesses: "I'm not a cow, but a cunt," and then carries on to provide a pretty convincing justification.

Despite the considerable drama of the event, the Stockwell shooting is not the play's main focus. Those tragic events provide a jumping-off point for a general assault on what the news media does, and how and why it does it. Reporters are portrayed as puppets and cynics; knowing what they should really be doing, but held back by craven executives imposing their bosses' will.

Stockwell tells us much about the media. On day one, starved of information from eyewitnesses and the police, the story was wrong. Too few news outlets had any critical distance between themselves and what the police said. The media played a sizeable role in getting at the truth, be it from leaks of documents and photos showing the initial police account to be wrong, but it was for them to follow this up with investigative reporting digging out the real facts on the killing.

In the play, the media's initial – mistaken – account of the shooting is down to a slavish adherence to the official line. As the character of golden-boy reporter Fin says: "This is journalism. It's the best we can do with the information available."

From the playwright's perspective, it's a damning indictment of the press. Through the eyes of a working reporter, it's a statement of the bleeding obvious; not for nothing is journalism – even at its best – called the first draft of history. Rarely, if ever, is it definitive.

The play seems at times to be a theatrical version of Nick Davies's book on modern journalism, Flat Earth News. It even features Davies's catchy phrase "churnalism" – a way of describing desk-bound reporters churning out articles based on news agency wires, press releases and spin.

To some reporters from some newsrooms, the scenes and the characters will trigger a sense of deja vu: in this fictional newsroom, initiative and a search for the truth is secondary to toeing the line, with the news editor using a mix of passive-aggressive bullying and humiliation to neutralise dissent.

Oh Well ... has its flaws, but to dismiss it because it offers no solutions would be wrong. Those who believe news journalism has to have a future for our democracy to function should be pleased people still care enough to write and stage such a play. Despite the shortcomings, it's a production deserving of a wider audience – something that applies to proper news journalism too.